I sleep beside him that night, after he’s done with me. I curl up, tuck my knees to my chest and do this weird thing that’s like crying, because my body is seizing as if I’m sobbing, but no tears are coming out. I’m just…jerking around, hugging my knees as if they’ll give me comfort. I look over at Garrett a few times, because, impossibly, I still hope for some small measure of kindness, a bit of acknowledgment, something to let me know…what? What am I looking for from him? To know I still exist? Do I?

In the morning I pack my clothes into my bag, moving disjointedly like the connection between my brain and body has been severed. I keep dropping things, bumping into chairs, buckling at the knees. I can’t look at him today. I can’t run away, I’m not strong enough for that, but I’m strong enough to keep my eyes to myself. It’s the best I can do for now.

He comes to me as I open the front door, takes my chin in his fingertips, and I pause, even as I think I should be bolting out the front the door. I gaze up at him. I’m made of paper, weightless and blank and tearable.

“Hey,” he says, and his eyes are soft, so soft that I can almost convince myself I imagined everything he said and did to me last night, or at least…distorted it. Perverted it. I’m good at that. I might’ve taken everything he said totally wrong. I might have confused him by inviting him to hurt me all those times. “Hey,” he says again. “You understand why I did what I did last night, right?”

Now I’m fuzzy, staring into his eyes, hearing his words, sensible words, but where is the logic behind them? “No,” I say. “I don’t think I…” But maybe I do understand. I understand that he wants me to hate myself all the way down to the marrow of my bones. I have to be so thoroughly destroyed in life that death, by comparison, is beautiful.

I can feel myself blinking too many times, but I’m nodding, nodding along with him because that’s where he’s put me. That’s where I’ve let him put me. It’s where I’ve wanted to be, ever since I saw my mother’s lifeless hand dangling over the edge of the bathtub and knew it was my fault.

“How do you feel?” Garrett asks. We’re still standing in the entryway with the door only slightly ajar. The air outside is chilly despite the cloudless azure sky.

“I feel like smoke blowing away,” I tell him, and I don’t even care that it’s a weird thing to say. It’s the truth.

“Go to class today,” he says. “Keep thinking of last night. Think of yourself on that kitchen counter with your panties up your pussy. Think of how you took it in the ass. Wet yourself over me.”

I flinch at his ugly words, words he shouldn’t say on a nice morning like this with the sun so cheerful and bright. “Okay,” I tell him, and the wrongness of it is already making me wet between the legs.

---

Back at the dorm, I have some time before I have to leave for class. Daphne’s still asleep. I shower again, gentle with myself, because I’m torn down below, but I need to get any remnants of Garrett off me. I’m slow, though. An hour ago I felt like smoke; now I weigh a million pounds.

I trudge back to my room to dress, taking a little extra time to apply some eyeliner and spray perfume. Liza did a good job picking out a scent for me—floral and spicy, but subtle. I rub it all up and down my inner forearms, and I even put some on my legs, behind my knees.

There’s still a little tag attached to the bottle, which I tear off and toss in the trash, but when I do, I accidentally toss the cap in with it. Something in the basket catches my eye. Food boxes, which is normal, but…unopened food boxes, which is not.

I push a couple of the boxes aside. Five boxes of food, the little pasta mixes that come in handy when you can’t get to the grocery store for fresh produce. Mindlessly, I lift a couple of the boxes out of the trash and examine them for damage. Ants, maybe? Expired? But I can’t find anything wrong.

Daphne’s still asleep, her tiny body swallowed beneath the folds of her comforter. My heart is pounding now, because why would she do this? How am I supposed to be at peace if she’s refusing to eat, starving herself? I can’t leave her like this. I pull the boxes out of the trash, one by one, and throw them at her sleeping form. Goddammit, I cannot leave her like this.

She wakes up when the second one hits, startled into consciousness and immediately alert. One of her arms comes up on reflex and blocks the third box I throw at her. I throw a fourth and it hits her in the head.

“Malory!” she screams. “You fucking psycho! What the fuck?”

“Would you…quit…fucking…starving yourself?” I throw the last box and it bangs into the wall beside her head.

There is guilt in her round, wide eyes, in the tight set of her jaw. She didn’t think I’d come home, or didn’t think I’d notice, or didn’t think I’d care.

“It’s not that bad, Malory, I swear, it’s not.” Her eyes are brimming with tears now, and her face is so pink it blends in with her lips.

“You’re throwing food in the trash, Daphne. That’s fucking crazy.” Crazy. Holy shit, I’m a hypocrite.

“The pasta…it’s…empty calories. I’d rather—”

I rush to her bed and grab her by the shoulders even though the quick movement sends pain shooting through my pelvic region, to the places Garrett hurt. “Empty calories, are you fucking kidding me, Daphne? You’re a skeleton, you could use some goddamn empty calories.” This is for sure the wrong thing to say—not empathetic, not therapeutic, not nice.

She lets me shake her, doesn’t even put up a fight. “But Malory, you have to understand…this is all I have. One little thing. I need this, okay?”

“You’re making yourself sick, Daphne. You are not in control.” More hypocrisy. My hands are still gripping her shoulders, almost pinching her. The way I’m hovering over her, the way my muscles are flexing, sends searing agony through my legs. The nerves and muscles are all connected down there. I want to transfer my pain to her, zap her with it like a cattle prod to make her come to her senses.

“Malory,” she says, her voice warbling, “do you have any idea what it’s like? To need to be a certain way but not be able to make it happen? I’m not supposed to…not supposed to…” Her voice cracks, her shoulders heave, and I do a bad, bad thing: I kiss her.

Her morning breath is awful, but I shove my tongue in her mouth anyway and grab her by the sides of her face, push my hands in her hair and climb on top of her, straddling her—fucking ouch ouch ouch—and of course she’s kissing me back, the poor girl, she’s hungry, hungry in lots of different ways, and boy don’t I know what that’s like.

She’s pulling at me now, dragging me down on top of her, spreading her legs and inviting me to her, her expensive comforter a cushiony boundary between us. Boxes of pasta are scattered around us, and one is even jammed in behind her back, but she doesn’t seem to notice—she’s breathing so hard now, lost in this terrible thing I’m doing to her, prepared to humiliate herself so she can feed that fire within her just a little. I get how she feels; she made Gabby uncomfortable with her too-real feelings, and I’m the only one left who can give this to her. And I think I might. It feels just wrong enough to make me want it.

I push away the boxes, shove them off the bed, send them thunking onto the floor. Then I jam my thigh between her legs and let myself fall all over her, this poor, skinny thing. She’s practically hyperventilating, tipping her head back and clawing at me, and I think, I could do whatever I want to this girl.

Two months. Two months from the time I flung my father’s hand away from me—If you tell, you’ll regret it—to the time my mother killed herself. He thought he could do whatever he wanted with us. Am I evil, like him?

“Malory,” she breathes. “Just this once—I want to know what it’s like.”

Didn’t she go all the way with Gabby? I pause with my mouth open against her neck, exhaling my humid breath against her skin. Her voice—broken and desperate and wanting and…it’s too much, she wants too much. I sit back, catching my breath. “I thought you…I mean, with Gabby? You didn’t…?” I feel myself settling, as if I’ve had an out-of-body experience and am just coming back to myself.

“No…no.” Her face turns red again, as if the memory carries actual heat. “For her it was just a show, for the guys, and I got too…too into it. She freaked out. She knew.”

I can’t be a gross throw-away first time for her. I can’t. “Daphne…”

“It won’t get weird, I swear. I mean it’s just sex, right? Maybe I won’t even like it.”

“You’re a lesbian. You’ll like it.”

“Don’t say that word.”

“Why, because saying it might make it true?” I roll my eyes and push back further, wincing in pain as I turn and plant my feet on the floor. “Hey, I know you have some kind of crazy complex about being perfect because your parents already lost a kid. I know you have these insanely high expectations that you think you need to live up to, but your parents? They’re going to love you anyway. And the rest of the world? Fuck them. Seriously, just fuck them.”

I turn to look at her. She’s shaking, tears are dribbling out of the corners of her eyes. “I tried so hard to be normal…”

“Jesus, Daphne, there are millions of people in the world who are gay. It’s normal. Whatever. Be gay. I promise your parents will still love you.” I’m impressed with how sane and supportive I sound, as though I’m normal too, as though I plan to go on living my life like any other person.

She doesn’t respond, just stares at the ceiling, so completely still that she starts to look like a doll, motionless, unblinking. I think she must be sorting through the revolving-door possibilities of her life. I sit with her like that, letting her ponder, until I have to leave for my first class.

---

Rome and I don’t have class together anymore, but he asks if I want to study together, and I like sitting with him. So that afternoon we share a couch in the student lounge, open textbooks in our laps, him alternating between eyeballing me warily and highlighting text from whatever book he’s looking at, and me flipping lazily through my new microeconomics text but not highlighting anything.

Oddly, despite making no effort at all to read the words on the page in front of me, I’m absorbing the information. Industrial concentration, cartels, monopolies, antitrust regulation…the concepts pile in neat layers on the indifferent shelves of my mind. It’s as though my thoughts have been stripped of feeling and worry, and now all that’s left is cold, dead intellectualism. All this time I was trying so hard to be smart and all I had to do was stop giving a fuck.

I shift on my stinging backside and wallow in the sharp, tight feeling that surges through my most sensitive parts and down my legs. How much worse would the pain be if I’d put up a fight?

I catch Rome staring at me then, and I think I must have flown away for a bit. My thumbs are pushing at my destroyed nail beds. I don’t remember putting down my highlighter. “What?” I ask him.

He studies me carefully for a moment longer, then walks his fingers to my squirming hand and flattens it with his. “You didn’t hear shit I just said, did you?”

I shrug. “I was thinking about…” I look down at my book. “…government redistribution of wealth.”

“The fuck you were.” He laughs without humor. “Malory, something’s really off with you since break.”

I stare at him. I should drop my eyes, I think, but…eh, who even cares. I keep staring.

“Are you mad at me?”

My turn to laugh. “You’re the last person I’d be mad at, Rome.”

“You’re just…like you seem okay, sometimes happy even, but…in a not-right kind of way.”

I grab his hat and pull it down over his eyes, all playful, ha ha ha.

But his hand springs up and grabs my wrist, the movement so fast it is almost violent, and it startles me an inch out of my chair.

“Rome!” My heart thuds in my temples.

“This,” he says, righting his hat and drawing my wrist to his face, to his nose. He inhales luxuriantly and says, “Fuck,” and my heart is still going nuts and I think I should pull my hand away from him, but now I can’t stop watching his face as he breathes me in. “This is the first time I’ve ever smelled perfume on you.”

If you could take love and give it a skeleton and organs and muscles and cover it all up with skin…that’s Rome right now.

I let him have my arm for a minute, captivated by his rapture. My pulse slows. His eyes are closed and he’s inhaling over and over, and I should be creeped out but I can’t be; he’s too earnest. There is nothing gross about his worship of me.

“Liza got it for me,” I say. “For Christmas.”

“I bet it doesn’t smell as good in the bottle,” he says with his mouth still pressed against my wrist. “It’s your skin, how the smell of you mixes with the smell of the perfume.” His breath is warm and breezy and alive.

“You are unreasonably transparent, Rome.”

He inhales deeply one more time, then sets my hand back down on the table. “I don’t know any other way to be.”

---

He calls me away that night, and the next night, and the next. All it takes is a single message and there is a sick pull in my loins, as if Garrett can physically reach into my body and reel me in by my intestines. I float to him like a ghost, or like smoke, and I suppose that is exactly what I am when I am with him: a formless nothing. There’s not much left. I float over him, watch him force himself into my body while my empty shell grits her teeth and snarls at him, which is exactly what he wants, exactly what he likes.

Wednesday is different only in the sense that it’s Wednesday and not Tuesday. Everything else is the same. I inhabit myself during the day with some consistency; I smile and joke and elbow Rome in the ribs, and eventually he stops asking what the ever-loving fuck is wrong with me. When I’m gone, he’ll probably wish he’d done more.

I keep missing Daphne, but Thursday morning when I come home from Garrett’s, I find a note from her on my bed: “I told them. They still love me.” And a little heart drawn next to it, as if she’s a child, as if maybe she told her parents by handwritten note, too: I’m a lesbian, do you still love me? Check yes or no. I take a tube of lipstick from her dresser, apply it, then kiss the note and leave it on her pillow to find. She’ll know I’m not flirting with her.

Bethany and I are back to eating our donuts and practicing every morning. I play in studio class Thursday afternoon and blow everybody’s socks right the fuck off. It’s easy to perform well when you don’t give a shit what anyone thinks.

My audition is Saturday. I’m going to go ahead and do it.